Metalenz Acquires PxE Imaging, Expanding Its Perception Platform to Bring New Insights to AI

• Acquisition expands Metalenz's addressable applications across NIR and visible, leverages established supply chain
• PxE’s method for creating color images brings 2.5x more light to the sensor while capturing visible and depth information simultaneously, enabling new applications in consumer imaging, autonomous driving, and machine vision
• Sensor-integrated hardware provides multimodal data from a single camera, reducing the computational burden downstream, enabling AI to run more efficiently at the edge
  

BOSTON, Nov. 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Metalenz today announced the acquisition of PxE Imaging, an Israeli startup with a transformative technology that enables new information to be brought to standard image sensors.

Spun out of Harvard University in 2016, Metalenz has evolved from a pioneer in metasurface optics into a full-stack perception platform, with more than 300 million metasurface optics shipped in consumer devices. Manufactured at semiconductor scale using foundry compatible processes, Metalenz integrates its technology directly onto CMOS image sensors, bringing new perception to machine vision with unique passive hardware.

The company's PolarEyes platform captures polarization information, enabling AI vision systems to differentiate materials based on their underlying physics and access entirely new data about the physical world. The first product application, Metalenz's Polar ID system, brings payment-grade face authentication to consumer devices at a fraction of the size and cost of incumbent solutions, solving an end user need while demonstrating how advanced sensing can scale to edge devices.

PxE Imaging has been developing Holocoder technology, invented by PxE Co-founder and CEO Yoav Berlatzky. The PxE platform, directly patterned on the sensor like Metalenz's Polar ID solution, harnesses the wave nature of light to physically decode information such as wavelength and depth, enabling simultaneous capture of color and depth information in the same image with a single camera.

Today, image sensors used in billions of cameras make a color image using a Bayer filter. While such filters allow the color image to be reconstructed, they absorb 60% of the light coming into the camera. PxE’s Holocoder technology eliminates the need for the Bayer filter and sorts light without absorption, increasing the light delivered to a standard image sensor by 2.5x, drastically improving camera performance from the darkest to the brightest scenes. The same hardware layer encodes natively aligned spatial geometries alongside the visible image, eliminating the need for computationally expensive sensor fusion or additional modules.

With its acquisition of PxE, Metalenz adds color and depth information to the material and surface data it already captures in a form factor and at a scale built for mass-market devices and semiconductor economics, from consumer electronics and automotive to drones and robotics. Because this information is decoded directly in hardware rather than reconstructed in software, it reduces the computational burden downstream, enabling AI to run more efficiently at the edge — a critical requirement for physical AI.

"Metalenz has strategically expanded its IP from unique hardware to full-stack solutions co-designed with our metasurfaces," said Rob Devlin, Co-founder and CEO of Metalenz. "We've deployed into the most demanding customer devices, built a supply chain at mass-market scale, and built a software stack that takes information delivered to a sensor all the way through AI decisions. With PxE's technology and team, we're expanding our capabilities into visible sensing, addressing a longstanding problem of low light performance while solving the new physical AI problem of obtaining richer information beyond conventional RGB imagery. Owning hardware that brings new information to sensors is the real moat for differentiated AI models. Our combined capability with PxE extends that same principle across all of machine vision, so people and machines can see and understand more about the world without relying on heavy computation."

“We developed the Holocoder to capture information in light that conventional sensors discard or cannot see, giving cameras greater light sensitivity and the ability to capture color and depth together,” said Yoav Berlatzky, Co-founder and CEO of PxE Imaging. “Joining Metalenz gives us the manufacturing platform and commercial reach to bring this technology to everyday devices. Together, we can give people better images and machines a richer understanding of the world.”

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

About Us

Metalenz is expanding perception for the next generation of intelligent devices. With more than 300 million metasurface optics shipped into high-volume consumer devices, the company has advanced from pioneering metasurface optics to delivering full-stack optical intelligence solutions that transform how machines see and understand the physical world. By integrating foundry-compatible optics directly onto image sensors and combining them with computational algorithms, Metalenz captures information from light that conventional optics cannot — creating entirely new data sets for machine vision and edge AI in passive hardware. Manufactured at semiconductor scale, Metalenz brings advanced sensing capabilities once confined to specialized systems into mass-market devices, enabling new capabilities and insights previously impossible on device.

PxE Imaging is an Israel-based developer of Holocoder technology, which enables standard CMOS image sensors to capture significantly more light and natively resolve depth alongside color. Built to replace expensive, multi-sensor cameras and active illumination systems, PxE's technology delivers high-performance 3D sensing at a fraction of the cost, size, and power consumption.

Media Contact

Carly Glovinski

Senior Marketing Manager, Metalenz

media@metalenz.com